Happy New Year everyone! And praise God that we can truly be happy for the New Year. Our Lord and King, Jesus Christ, is victorious, and His will is done on earth as it is in heaven! As our New Year begins, we're looking forward to implementing our strategic plan to facilitate the growth of Christ's Kingdom.

This next year we've decided to focus on further developing a few main business concepts, with the intention of replicating them throughout the 10/40 window. The 10/40 window, between 10 and 40 degrees North of the equator, is home to most of the world's people groups that still remain unreached with the Gospel. It consists of North Africa, the Middle East and most of Asia.

We're particularly eager for the New Year because in 2008 we are aiming to lay the foundations for two business concepts: service-based companies and fair-trade handicraft companies. For example, we'll be working to tailor software programs for the service-based concept to streamline sales processes by consolidating sales, billing and customer receipts. This concept already has a corporate entity in place with strong sales and using this foundation for other projects will enable significant cost savings in the future. With the fair trade handicraft concept, development is underway of a network of producers and retailers. (Please pray for us in that regard, as we're still recruiting people to build the retail side of this model.)

"Once the foundation is laid and the concept is created, it's going to be a lot easier to replicate businesses across the 10/40 window," says senior consultant Jonathan Chan." We're aiming for 20 stable business by 2010," he says. The business concepts were chosen based on simple supply-demand fundamentals. There is both a need and a market for the products these businesses provide and because they are conducive for growing the gospel through development of strong relationships with locals. "They involve a lot of contact with people," says Chan, "The operations are people-intensive." The concepts are also ripe for delivery because much of the infrastructure is already established. "We'll be able to piggy back off that structure, and not have to recreate the wheel each time," he adds.

Chan says Access Partners decided to concentrate on the business-concept strategy because it will be easier for our supported missionaries to replicate them. Access Partners is now being more proactive: we want to find the people to fill our business concepts, rather than the other way around. "In the past, we did businesses that missionaries, without considering what would be most effective, wanted to do," says Chan. "Sometimes missionaries think of a business that is interesting to them, as opposed to something that is viable, so hopefully we can now give them something that is both feasible and interesting," he says.

To supplement this strategy, we are working hard at encouraging growth in church involvement. Right now, for example, we"re working with Covenant Life Church to put together a core group of people that would provide targeted help on graphics and web design to help develop marketing materials and refine websites for the services related business.